


Gravestones

by passeridae



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, discussion of child death, teaching children history through cemeteries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-04 20:26:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15848736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/passeridae/pseuds/passeridae
Summary: You’re standing in a cemetery, shoes pressed into the damp earth, when the thought first hits you: One day, I am going to die. At the time, your fingers are ghosting over the tombstone of a child who died in 1905, most likely from measles, your father tells you. Last week, he had taught you how to correlate historical events with the tombstones in the cemeteries around your house, and you’d been looking for deaths in this year specifically to see if the graves matched your predicted pattern.





	Gravestones

You’re standing in a cemetery, shoes pressed into the damp earth, when the thought first hits you: One day, I am going to die. At the time, your fingers are ghosting over the tombstone of a child who died in 1905, most likely from measles, your father tells you. Last week, he had taught you how to correlate historical events with the tombstones in the cemeteries around your house, and you’d been looking for deaths in this year specifically to see if the graves matched your predicted pattern. 

Perhaps this was a macabre thing to be teaching a child, but you had insisted on visiting every cemetary you passed since the time you had learned to walk, and your father had been smart enough to turn these visits into something educational once it was clear your interest was fixed. Thus far, you had learnt how to research genealogies, how to track historical epidemics, and how to make accurate rubbings of particularly pretty tombstones to take home. The walls of your room are covered with names and patterns taken from your favourites in pink, teal, lavender, and cyan (your mother, you overheard one night, despises that you decorate in this way, but your father talked her down from ripping them from the walls. What sort of message would that send, he’d asked, to tell her that her interests are so despicable).

It is the age of the child, only five, which had caused the realisation to strike. You had always considered death to be something that happened to old people, frail people who had lived their lives and were now moving on, not people around your age who had barely begun. There is a moment when fear grips your throat as you think of your preschool friends vanishing, one by one, as must have happened to this child. Hundreds of children, just like you, suddenly ceasing to exist. Far from being something remote and removed, just stones and grass and silene, the reality of death is now right in front of your eyes. You forget how to breathe. Noting your sudden silence, your father steps over from a nearby tombstone and asks how you’re doing.

You look up at him, worry etched across you features. “I will die someday,” you say to him in all seriousness. It would be easy for him to laugh the statement off, say that this is obvious, make a joke at your expense, but he does none of those things. Instead he squats down to your level and looks you in the eye. “Yes,” he says, seriously, “you will. So will I. All people die eventually.” He reaches out to skim his fingers across the engraving you’re touching, his fingers passing under your hand, and adds, “When this child was born, almost all children died before they reached the age of ten. It’s only in the last fifty years that’s really changed.” You look down at your dress, smocked, floral, below your knees so you can grow into it, and think of all those children who never had a chance to grow into their own clothes. “How did the parents deal with it?” you ask, nervously. If your father died, you don’t even know what would happen, but none of it could be good. How could death be so common that most people never even got to become fathers or mothers themselves? He smiles, softly, and says, “With sadness, and grief, the same way as I would if something were to happen to you.” You shuffle closer to him, frowning, and continue to ask questions. About death, about grief, about how people lived when it was so common. Your father is patient, answering all of them one by one, explaining how society had changed and what that meant for the people in 1905 and what it meant for you.

Finally, you turn your eyes from your father to stare back at the gravestone and swallow. “I think I’d like to bring this girl flowers when we visit next time,” you decide. At your side your father smiles, “I think that’s a lovely idea.”


End file.
